April 2, 2007
Hey Folks,
Big trauma here. A little twist of fate has changed our lives and made us grateful for each other and for
you, our wonderful loving friends.
Andrew was run over by a unmanned runaway truck on Monday April 2 which really fucked him up. At the scene, they told me he might not live and he would never walk again. He will in fact live, and may come back to nearly his original strong handsome self. It should take about a year and we could really use pictures of everyone now here before he wakes up (smiling preferably) as our friends are scattered around the world, though we know you are here in spirit.
2741 Calkins Place
Broomfield, CO 80020
I happened to be with him up in Granby because I had the time off and randomly decided to go to work with him for the day. If I wasn't there, who knows where he'd be now because there was no one around except for the fuck wit who didn't put the parking break on a F250 with a trailer parked on an incline. It just snuck up on Andrew quietly and mowed him down.
Fortunately he didn't have time to react and went straight under the center looking up and didn't get hit by the tires. He stopped the vehicle and it rolled a 6 ft 4 inch guy into a 2 ft square ball, crushing his legs into his chest and doing quite a number on him.
His injuries are:
3 crushed vertebrae (back surgery tomorrow to fuse 7 and they are not fusing two others we thought so he will have pretty good mobility and will be able to hike and climb and bike. He had displacement but didn't sever the cord so he won't have paralysis if the surgery goes well tomorrow).
· broken femur (they put a titanium rod in two days ago and he'll be able to walk on it soon because it was a clean break and he had no compound fractures amazingly)
· broken collar bone
· broken rib
· traumatically dislocated knee
· partially collapsed lung (which is now reinflating)
· severely bruised lung (which has developed into
· pnemonia)
We will have mental trials for a long time but no brain damage by a little twist of fate and some lucky stars.
So, he is now suffering from possible kidney failure due to the sluffing of the dead muscle from the
crushing injury overloading his kidneys. He has low levels of oxygen in his blood and they can't figure
why. He had developed pneumonia and has low blood counts so they are giving him blood. He is
maintaining a temperature of 102. He is feisty and the nurses had to sedate him because he kept asking
for things and banging the bed and growling and choking on his breathing tube and trying to pull it
out and such.
They sedated him so that he can't give us thumbs up and smiles and furrow his brow anymore which is lonely for me but great rest for him. He was trying to sit up and stretch his back (he's never been very good and lying still for long and he's definitely going to be the most lively patient they've seen for a while in intensive care) which wasn't good because his back is still displaced and unstable so nothing is protecting his spinal cord.
He is scheduled for a back surgery tomorrow to fuse the vertebrae at 7:30 am which will last 8 hours. It
has already been put off 4 times because of his unstable condition so we are just rolling with the
punches and taking the highs and lows and trying to practice patience and serenity. I had a little harp
donated after I learned other harps are allowed in the trauma unit, and I have been playing for him a bit.
It lowers his heart rate and makes him look peaceful.
He has had an aerobic heartrate since the accident even in La La land, so he is working hard to recover.
They put him in a bed that rocks from side to side like a boat. It makes me seasick to watch but is
great for his lungs to loosen the junk in them. He will be fully prepared for all future space missions.
The funny stuff (not funny, like ha ha, but funny like, black British humor):
While Andrew was crushed under the truck he was yelling to me, "Get the keys! Put the dogs in the car and lock it! I don't think we have insurance! (which is true because I was between jobs and COBRA doesn't cover spouses, but the job site will cover the medical expenses and the lawsuit will pay our overdraft fees eventually. Andrew was 5 days before qualifying for insurance coverage with his job). Call my boss and tell her I won't be inspecting the other job sites today! Here is her number...(then he rattled it off).
We got two new husky puppies who would normally bolt but they stayed right next to Andrew the entire time he was under the truck and howled. I eventually whacked them, which I feel bad about now.
I am looking forward to bringing them home as they are with foster parents and they were the only ones with me during the accident. The nurses tell us the dogs will be good for our healing (of course, they haven't met the huskies. We did put wood floors in our entire house the weekend before all this, so we will be able to deal with their erratic puppy bowl movements better).
At the emergency room in Granby, the nurse could see I was having some trouble as they were letting me help cut his clothes off and hold his hand so she took me aside and told me, "Honey, my husband used to work as a police man and on a domestic violence house call he was stabbed in the back of the neck with a 6 inch knife. After rehab, you know what he did? He went back and shot the guy dead."
I'm still not sure what the take-home message was there, but I do think Andrew will have some anger to
sort out. He has been talking a lot lately about wanting a high clearance vehicle for his site visits
and I think he may deserve one now, though I hope it’s not a truck.
Also, I made sure to inform his father that his package was intact and properly working so there would
still be grandkids.
We have had to fill out some dumb forms in the hospital and one question was, “When did the problem start?” I wrote, “When the F250 mowed my husband down.” Another question was, “Does the patient have any special needs?” I wrote, “English breakfast tea with 2% milk.” It was late and Barry and I were delirious camped in the waiting room. I have signed so many consent forms, I certainly hope I don’t get a chewing out when Andrew awakens.
Stuff that will make you cry:
Mentally for me, it is going to be hard to get the images of him trapped and being able to do nothing
and assuming he was bleeding and would die in minutes.
I kept it together and told him to think of a happy place and to breathe deeply and the doctor asked if I
was in medicine as I was pretty laid back for having seen the incident. I guess it’s just life experience.
My mom is now taking care of most of the keeping the nurses in line, and that is from the benefit of her
life experiences.
He is in the best trauma ward in the vicinity. People are flown in here with the most serious injuries from all nearby states. He has
· 5 back specialists,
· 1 leg specialist,
· 1 lung specialist,
· a general manager, and
· multiple nurses assigned to him per shift.
St. Anthony's hospital was the first place to have flight for life flights (which they tried to do, but it was too windy so he was brought in an ambulance) as there are so many ski areas nearby so the doctors are used to seeing head and back trauma. It’s a bit ghetto and some of the nurses should be lightly beaten, but we finally figured out how to turn the lights off in the waiting room, so we are getting a better night’s sleep.
Verizon was supposed to send us new phones the day before after the puppies ate them but the phones were delayed and we could not call 911. A woman stepped out on her balcony at the accident scene eventually after hearing me yelling for help and she said she had called. We still have not met that woman and she may have been lost in the fray. I couldn't do anything so I took pictures of the scene which weren't too graphic but pictures do exist from the sheriff, and Andrew may want to look at them someday.
The boy responsible for letting the car roll down the hill by not putting chocks under the tires on a fairly steep grade was up the hill in an operating earth mover which he had taken off of the truck which was why it had a trailer and rolled. I ran up to him banging on the windows and asking if he had the keys. He did, and fortunately we did not drive the car off of Andrew or he would have been killed.
Unfortunately, the fellow was also in shock and jumped in the back of the truck looking for a shovel to dig Andrew out, crushing him more because the car was on a slight burm and had literally rolled across the street and over a fence to get him. Andrew yelled, "Get out of the fucking truck." Eerily we have the last picture Andrew took which was of the landscape facing away from the vehicle. It was pretty bleak. As luck would have it, Andrew was dragged along the dirt off the side of the road, so he had very little bleeding, mostly scraping wounds externally (plenty of broken bones though and collapsed lungs), and the give of the dirt probably is the reason he will walk again.
At the time, a large fire was happening outside of Granby and it is my understanding only one fire truck was available. The guys had never done an extraction of this sort. Andrew was under the truck for 30 minutes before they arrived and it took them about 10 minutes to get the truck off him though it felt like a lifetime. I know it is only my delusions now, but I remember them giving each other high fives and loafing out of the truck then standing around and asking for coffee. I am pretty sure they were moving though when they realized the situation, because they got boards under the two lower wheels and put an airjack under the middle of the truck immediately. It seemed to me there was excessive discussion on how to accomplish this task and since we had 30 people standing around, we should have been able to just push it off of him, but it is lucky they didn’t take that course because his foot was caught in the underworkings, and after moving the truck up a little, they dug out underneath him and got a board under him to protect his back. They brought him to the hospital still pretzeled up which may also have saved his spinal cord as his vertebrae were displaced.
He was desperate for a pen the second day in so I got him one and he scrawled in weak handwriting "I love you". Then he scrawled, "Suction (meaning he wanted the nurses to get on it)" and "choking" which has been hard to deal with as he really doesn't like breathing with a respirator.
Our second day in the trauma unit our 30 yr old neighboring patient was taken off life support and took all day to pass on. His family was mourning his loss while we were watching Andrew go into surgery on his femur. They were going towards two different lights. It was a very difficult day. While we have been here, two young folks have come in, a 14 yr old girl with severe brain damage from a skiing crash and a 17 yr old paralyzed from neck down from ski accident. The woman next door to us now was pushed off something by her husband. The other young fellow left his wife as they’d been fighting while he was on drugs, and he tried to kill himself by jumping in front of a car traveling at 80 miles per hour but didn't manage to finish the job. It’s all just a constant reminder that we are so lucky to have the chance to have all of Andrew with us, and I am just so happy to have the opportunity for another chance to share my life with him and to have my love come home soon for a cup of tea.
We could really use your ongoing support and thoughts and maybe funny and inspirational things to read him eventually when he is strong enough and comes back.
Please get some cards lined up for him for the next 6 months as the hard part will set in when he is frustrated with slow recovery. It will be mentally very difficult for him to understand that you can be super organized, fastidious, and make all the right choices and still, lose control.
Send cards to our home:
Andrew and Erin Green
2741 Calkins Place
Broomfield, CO 80020
I keep having that song in my head,
“Sometimes you're the windshield,
Sometimes you're the bug.
Sometimes it all comes together baby,
Sometimes you're just a fool in love.”
Hopefully that will go away eventually too. I am not keeping up with returning your calls but we appreciate your support and concern. I can't thank my parents and Barry and Donna enough for meeting me at the hospital and staying with me and helping by being our coordinators. Life is really enriched by having solid friends and family, and we are happy to have all of you and all of your well wishes and thoughts.
Love Erin